Macrame bracelet

(9 Aug)

Macrame bracelet in chocolate and teal

I’ve been making this on and off since last weekend – it took rather a while. I used the pattern from Free-Macrame-Patterns, but mine’s slightly different – I didn’t realise until I was halfway through that you were supposed to start in the middle of your pieces of cord so you could work outwards in both directions, so mine just went the same way for the whole thing. This also meant I had to fudge the ends a little as the top ones weren’t long enough to do the right knot. It could all have been solved by more photographs in the instructions!

It has a sliding fastening, shown at full stretch. You pull on the heart strings (ohohoho) to tighten it once you’ve put it on. I was using C-lon beading cord, which has a diameter of around 0.5mm. The pattern says to use 50 inch lengths of cord – that really wasn’t necessary. 30 would have covered it.

The beads are little silver-painted plastic things that I got in my mystery box. I rather like them – the black in the lines makes them look slightly tarnished. If I was doing it again I think I’d leave out the butterfly ones though, as they have to stick out of the design to fit. The construction required judicious use of nail polish (it can be used instead of clear glue to coat the ends and stop them fraying, and to glue the very end knots on a thread together so they’re unlikely to come undone).

While making it, I was using a mini-corkboard that I picked up from a pound shop. It’s very thin, but you can stick pins in it and in this case, use masking tape to fasten the top of the bracelet to the top of the frame. I also used masking tape to keep my current holding cord taut.